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Naigel Carusi v2

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<h3>Workshop unites large office spaces for global creative companies, small spaces for startups and shopfronts, an indoor/outdoor sunken café, a double height gym, and a childcare centre.</h3>

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Workshop&#8217;s expression is of its place, and its integrated interior supports 21st century whole wellbeing. Together, these design features stich Workshop into the neighbourhood and allow the building to give back, enhancing Pyrmont’s fabric.
The campus workplace is contained within two 4 and 6-storey linear volumes that are set back on the upper levels to preserve sunlight to the residential buildings to the south. They are located over a recessed two storey base that accommodates the childcare centre, gym, and small shopfronts. This mix helps create active street frontages. The commercial entry lobby is located between the volumes off Harris Street at upper ground level.
The façade’s 450mm deep terracotta frame recalls the robust materiality of Pyrmont’s brick warehouses. It has square proportions and splayed verticals with bronze reveals. Within the frames, large 3.5m x 3.5m frameless picture windows allow light to stream inside, maximise views and connect the activity inside to the activity outside on the street. At the top of the building the terracotta frame transitions to bronze aluminium to acknowledge its stepped form.

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Inside, Workshop is designed for wellbeing, flexibility, collaboration and social connectivity. Its anchor spatial feature is its 2,640sqm campus floorplates organised around a central, full height atrium. This space is timber lined, naturally lit from rooftop glazing, and features vertical gardens with audible flowing water, and an open black steel stair—elements that forge strong connections to nature. Wintergardens with large operable windows counterpoint the atrium at each end of the building, pulling the connection to nature through the entire floorplate.
On either side of the atrium and central core a concrete structure with a 15m span provides flexible column free workspace. Concrete beams and soffits are exposed and uplit to maximise the sense of space and avoid creating a vacuous tiled office floor. The interior throughout is left consciously raw, with exposed building services, concrete floors and columns complemented by an authentic and tactile palette of timber, steel and indoor planting.

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A large, landscaped rooftop terrace provides flexible outdoor space with city and water views.
At ground the building takes advantage of its island site and sloping topography to accommodate neighbourhood scale uses on all streets and over multiple levels. The large café occupies the corner of the site, off Harris Street, doubling as an informal building entry. It also has vertical bifold doors that open onto a double height sunlit terrace. The gym is entered off the other corner of the site on Harris Street and connects to extensive end-of-trip facilities. The small loft tenancies line Harvey Street and feature individual entries, double height entries and mezzanine floors. The childcare centre is entered on grade off Mount Street Walk with outdoor play space overlooking Bowman Street.
Together, these features stich Workshop into the neighbourhood and allow the building to give back, enhancing Pyrmont’s fabric.

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Workshop

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<h3>The design for the Chifley South tower complements and respects the existing Chifley North tower, while being clearly of the 21st century in terms of people amenity, workplace and environmental performance.</h3>

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Chifley Square is a distinguished address in the Sydney CBD. The design for the new Chifley South tower will establish a unified precinct alongside the existing Chifley North tower, while the revitalised podium and public domain below will provide shared amenity and activate an urban ensemble.
The new integrated ground plane will have a double-height arcade between Bent Street and Hunter Street that opens the podium generously to the city. At the heart of this arcade is a grand urban room bringing together the entry lobby, business lounge, wellness, and retail spaces.
When complete, Chifley South will deliver over 50,000 sqm of next generation, sustainable workplace and amenity space.

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Chifley South

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<h3>50 Belmore Street responds to a growing demand from government and private sectors for contemporary, high quality office space in Western Sydney.</h3>
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As part of a broader plan to transform Penrith into a strategic centre for housing, services and employment, the project is a key contributor to Penrith’s emerging commercial core, close to retail and public transport.
Designed for Sandran Property Group and Podia, 50 Belmore Street complements the existing built context, whilst remaining adaptable to future development. In particular, the ground plane sets out connections to neighbouring sites indicated by Council as contributing to Penrith’s revitalisation. The result is a vibrant public domain activated by pedestrian laneways and a new café.

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The architecture is articulated as three distinct volumes, stepped in plan to respond to the cranked alignment of Belmore Street. The volumes also step in height as they relate to contextual datums. The western volume is setback to reveal a double height colonnade and entry lobby.
On the façade, each volume is expressed in a robust concrete grid. Angled aluminium panels provide a secondary level of articulation, plus sunshading.
Inside, campus-style floorplates are arranged around a large, central atrium lined in timber. Natural light filters through to support wellbeing, whilst circulation around the atrium perimeter encourages social interaction. At the bottom of the atrium, activity from the laneway café spills into the building’s interior.

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50 Belmore Street

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<h3>Our aim was to give Brindabella a social heart as an archetype for humanising and urbanising business parks.</h3>
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Brindabella Business Park, typical of many suburban business parks, has a series of object buildings within bucolic landscaped grounds; however it has always lacked a central gathering space for the community. We sought to create a social heart, and demonstrate a case for humanising and urbanising business parks.
The site was an at grade carpark opposite a large grass playing field in the centre of Brindabella Business Park, between the park’s perimeter loop road and its primary internal pedestrian spine. Our client sought two highly flexible commercial office buildings suitable for both government and private tenants, and for single or multiple occupiers. This ‘ultra’ flexibility was a recipe for the generic building typology typical of business parks.
We extended the alignment of the park’s main vehicle entry, which bisects the site diagonally, to create a laneway through the site. This connects the loop road to the pedestrian spine and also provides an entry address for the buildings. To engage the playing field and pedestrian spine we created a triangular public space that is open and welcoming to passers-by. The resultant building forms integrate the playing field, park entry, loop road and pedestrian spine into a new pedestrian oriented urban ensemble.
The resulting complex geometric forms utilise a side-core and central atrium to create rectilinear plates separated by an interconnecting stair. The floorplate elements are individually expressed, articulating the buildings as a series of discrete forms separated by natural ventilation slots.

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Inside, soft-cornered triangular atriums are lined with timber and animated with glass lifts. A light-reflecting ‘blob’ and perimeter skylight provide diffuse daylight through the interior, while reducing heat load and concealing return air and smoke exhaust systems. A series of intersecting circular elements at the base of the atrium creates a third space to sit, work or meet.
A civic scaled verandah with a floating canopy, supported by six-storey ‘super-thin’ steel columns, frames the playing field. This space creates a sympathetic scale to the playing field, while providing weather protection to the social heart. The canopy ‘floats’ off the buildings with an open perimeter strip. Retail tenancies activate the space while a field of trees with circular seating elements creates a space that anyone can come and enjoy.
Our aim was to humanise this building type, while relating to the aluminium and glass facades of the context. In place of the context’s bold colours and strong graphic sunshades, we used warm, natural materials with fine, human-scaled tectonic details. The ground floor is expressed with off-form concrete frames, creating a structural rhythm while incorporating shopfronts and entries. The office floors have horizontal steel channels with vertical sunshades in-between. The aerofoil profile sunshades are orientated on each facade for optimum solar protection, enabling highly transparent glazing to maximise visible light and connect occupants with nature.
In addition to natural ventilation and passive solar shading, the design has a 306kw/h photovoltaic array on the roof, making it Net Zero operational energy and achieving Gold WELL, 5-star NABERS, and 5 Green Star ratings.

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Brindabella

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<h3>Our mixed-use redevelopment above the historic Parcels Post Office building will celebrate heritage and demonstrate leadership in sustainability initiatives.</h3>

The Parcels Post Office is an integral part of the historic Central Railyards Precinct and was originally designed as a four-storey Georgian-style building. To add a tower above the heritage building without being overbearing or diminishing of its character, a design strategy utilising the concave and convex curves of the historic design was employed.
A cluster of ‘pill’ shaped forms complement the heritage building’s curved corners, creating slender vertical proportions while reducing visual bulk. This cluster of forms respond to the functions and recall the shape of indigenous message sticks.
Referencing the craft and materiality of the original Parcels Post Office, a contemporary interpretation pairs concave terracotta fins to create a human scale grid, visually uniting the various tower functions and providing passive shading and insulation.

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The tower design consists of 10 levels of hotel facilities, including 204 rooms, and two levels of hotel amenities. The commercial office space above is accommodated across 22 levels, offering highly flexible and contiguous floorplates suited to the evolving needs of technology-driven businesses.
At ground level, a redesigned Henry Deane Plaza with activated edges will integrate public art and heritage interpretation. Enhanced pedestrian links will improve connections in the precinct, while a diverse mix of settings will encourage people to relax and socialise.
Post Office Building stitches together the site’s significant historic character with its wider, future-focused precinct, creating a contemporary addition to the skyline whilst complementing the existing fabric below.

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TOGA Central

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<h3>1 Denison is a highly permeable building that promotes visual connectivity and openness — hallmarks of today’s workforce ideals.</h3>

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Located in the centre of North Sydney, immediately adjacent the proposed Victoria Cross Metro Station, our aim was to design a podium that is highly accessible, active and permeable at ground level, with a human scale and materiality. Its warm materials and human scaled spaces balance the tower’s glass and sleek expression.
The podium consists of two primary levels, a ground floor and a raised office level. The ground floor incorporates a pedestrian through-site link that extends the existing link between Little Spring and Walker Streets and connects to the Victoria Cross Metro station. The northern edges of the link are lined with retail, while the southern connects to the tower’s two lobbies.
Denison Street, with its cafes and restaurants, is also to the south beyond the lobby entrances. Tenancies sit under the podium overhang and open onto the laneway, breaking down indoor/outdoor boundaries via operable walls. A terraced mezzanine level above has additional dining areas with planting to add landscape to the groundscape.

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Like <a href="https://www.batessmart.com/projects/victoria-cross/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Victoria Cross</a>, 1 Denison helps anchor the North Sydney Central Laneways Precinct. The tower’s landscape plan prioritises pedestrians and creates a new, active groundplane by allowing pedestrians to cross mid-block through numerous squares. Major path identification helped to pinpoint where greenery, street furniture, art and water features will be most effective. They are all generously incorporated into 1 Denison’s design.
We have created a highly connected and contiguous floorplate, based on a side core typology. The structure is designed to maximise flexibility of the fitout. The workplace for Nine Network takes up 22,000sqm at 1 Denison, with a fitout that reflects the brand’s values &#8211; active and aspirational, progressive and exciting. Bates Smart led the strategy, fitout and design for this workplace, which prioritises open, light-filled project workspaces that radiate from a central hub in order to support the fluidity and speed of the newswroom’s activity.

Naigel Carusi

Studio Director

B.BuildEng(Arch) (Hons)